Fredric BRANDFON. Intimate Strangers: A History of Jews and Catholics in the City of Rome. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2023. Pp. xiii + 366. ISBN 9780827615571 (hardcover). Reviewed by Leo D. LEFEBURE. Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057.

Fredric Brandfon presents an engaging and informative overview of the many sides of relations between Jews and Catholics in Rome from ancient times to the present.  His central image is that the two parties are paradoxically intertwined as “intimate strangers,” constantly interacting with each other and relying on each other in a variety of ways, but also constantly caught in tension, misunderstanding, and mistrust as estranged members of a family that has difficulty in relationships.  Brandfon begins by highlighting the ambiguity of Jewish identity in the ancient world, where it was not always easy to demarcate who was a Jew and who was not, since Jews were both participants in the Roman world and separate from it.  Ambiguities continued in new ways after popes became the rulers of Rome. Brandfon recalls that historically from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, when a new pope was elected, Jews would present to him a scroll of the Torah in Hebrew, which the pope would refuse because he believed Jews did not interpret it in the proper way.  Popes acknowledged that the Torah scroll contained divine revelation, but they denied the Jewish understanding of it.  This repeated performance stands as a symbol for the many-sided relations between popes and Jews in Rome. In the exchange, Brandfon notes the reciprocal obligations being expressed in a city where Jews were dependent and vulnerable but nonetheless important and influential. In 1120 Pope Calixtus II granted Jews a place in Rome through his bull Sicut judaeis, but this place was periodically threatened by later popes. In 1555 Pope Paul IV objected to Jews and Catholics interacting as friendly neighbors; to make this more difficult, he erected the Roman Ghetto, restricting Jewish life in Rome for centuries to come. The coming of the French Revolution and Napoleon introduced a new, oscillating situation where Jews received full rights as citizens only to see these taken away by a subsequent government and then restored again later on.

Brandfon notes the irony that in the twentieth century some Jews supported Mussolini and were taken by surprise by the increasingly anti-Jewish measures of his Fascist regime. Brandfon follows earlier scholars in describing the many different roles played by Catholics during the Nazi deportation of Jews from Rome. Pope Pius XII sought to protect Catholics who had converted from Judaism and Jews who were married to Catholics but remained silent on the general deportation of Jews; nonetheless, Jews found shelter in the Vatican and many other Catholic institutions during this time of peril. Acknowledging the many different perspectives and questions surrounding the pope’s behavior, Brandfon criticizes Pope Pius’s silence and speculates that a papal statement could have saved Jewish lives in Rome and elsewhere in Italy.

Brandfon offers a brief overview of the positive changes in Jewish-Catholic relations brought about by the Second Vatican Council and subsequent popes.  In his conclusion he proposes the image of Jews and Catholics in Rome as members of “an unrealized family”—“The family is unrealized because the intermittent good feelings between the two peoples alternate with times of harrowing alienation” (273).  Throughout his discussion Brandfon is a helpful guide and commentator on the multi-sided drama.